First, the deadline. The more I write, the more I’ve found that a firm deadline helps me to focus on what I need to achieve. I’m planning on doing another ‘Agile Novel Development‘ post about this in the near future, talking about my experience with the concept of writing sprints and how writing in short, fixed bursts can be a great way to develop a consistent writing habit.

Second, the constraints – specifically the length of the story and the mandatory prompts. Every entrant received two mandatory and one optional prompt, all of them – seemingly – randomly mixed together. I’ve often found writing prompts a little too woolly to work with and appreciated that, in this case, I would have more than one connected prompt to work with.

When the morning of the challenge arrived, these were the prompts I was assigned: